What Twitter and others solved with micro-blogging was discovery. There was nothing wrong with personal blogs. Sure, they had a bit more setup than just signing up for Twitter and typing out some 140-word screed but they were perfectly capable. Blogspot and others made it free, you needn't even have a domain and yet people still went to Twitter to build their "brand" (I hate that phrase) and get "discovered" and then get the sales funnel going to send "fans" (also gross) to their paid newsletters, podcasts, books, etc., all of it facilitated by the algorithm and Twitter.